My impression at the time was that in the first year of the CoP the judges were pretty much at sea about what the program components were supposed to be about. Sasha was real pretty, so she got a good "second mark.

I thought the judges were only watching Sasha from the knees up and were completely ignoring her feet, especially her scratchy stroking. The wobbling from edge to edge on the flutz and flip take-off was, quite frankly, scary. At least in the SP she had speed going in her favour she was able to rotate and land the jumps, but in the LP the lack of speed or attack did her in.

I'll freely admit that the feet are the first thing I look at in a skater. Adrian Chew once said I have an "edge fetish". If the feet are good, I'll enjoy the skater. It's why I liked Sarah Hughes, because aside from the flutz, Sarah had lovely feet. From the knees up, she had posture issues and lacked great lines, things Sasha excelled at.

Maybe your husband needs some medication to help improve his patience, in addition to an understanding of what dramatic build-up is. Rewarding a skater for doing as many movements as possible, when it does not go with the music, is the same as rewarding a filmmaker for cutting every 3 seconds within the scene just because they can. Just because you can add more, that doesn't mean it produces a greater effect. Sometimes it detracts, in fact. If you stop to think about it, this is the same as the Canadian criticism of so many Russian costumes. It's something that everyone in fashion is aware of; intricately sewing tons of feathers and sparkly pieces onto a dress maybe be extremely difficult, but that doesn't mean the dress is something anyone wants to wear.

Attention spans around the World have likely dropped as a result of how modern media is handled, people have been trained to become restless at slow pacing of television/film, and such is sadly the case with how figure skating is evolving as a result of how the CoP is being handled. Obviously stalking jumps too much is a bad thing but that doesn't mean there isn't a time and a place for simplicity and for relatively long approaches into jumps, with nothing but simple movements leading up to it. It all comes down to the music and the character of the program. In film, sometimes you want quick cuts and sometimes you want long cuts. It's no different in figure skating. If we only reward tons of transitions in programs, then the sport is losing much of what makes it special and losing a vast amount of potential variety. Who wants to watch nothing but action films, if you are an adult of non-[color=red]*[/color][color=red]*[/color][color=red]*[/color][color=red]*[/color][color=red]*[/color][color=red]*[/color][color=red]*[/color][color=red]*[/color] intelligence?

what are you trying to say? Sorry, I have attention deficit syndrome .... can you make the above shorter? Thanks.

The more I hear about what Shizuka's good at, the happier I am that she's always been among my favorite skaters. In the early days of watching her, I didn't even understand half of what I was seeing. I just knew, maybe on some instinctual level, that she was amazing.

Sometimes I watch skating with people with absolutely no knowledge of the sport and with few exceptions, they always pick out the best skaters as their favourites. I do think that the quality often jumps right off the ice and you don't need a deep knowledge of technique to spot it.